


Three for Girls

by ishafel



Series: Same Old Story [3]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alpha/Omega, Alternate Universe, M/M, Mpreg, Post Mpreg, Post-Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-05
Updated: 2016-07-05
Packaged: 2018-07-21 14:12:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7390408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishafel/pseuds/ishafel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Seb's never been good at wanting the right things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Three for Girls

It turns out that coming off methadone is so unpleasant that Seb can’t even imagine what heroin must be like. If he hadn’t already thought Sherlock was bugfuck crazy, the realization that he’s voluntarily gone through with this more than once would have done it. But all at once he starts to feel like himself again, as if suddenly the world has shrunk around him and is manageable.

It takes less than a week before he’s bored with it. He loves Isobel-- Christ, he loves her so, so much, more than he’s ever let himself love anyone, but he doesn’t love housework or cooking or changing endless diapers. He steals a jogging stroller and flattens his breasts down with tape, and manages a couple of blocks the first time before he slows almost to a walk. 

“You shouldn’t run, dear, your uterus will fall out,” an elderly lady warns him as he passes her. 

“Good,” Seb says, and in the stroller Is laughs and claps her hands. She, at least, is having a wonderful time. 

But it comes back, a little at a time; not only the cardio but even his abs. He’ll never be twenty or even thirty again, but he’s in damn good shape for forty. Watson must agree; he watches Seb when he thinks Seb isn’t looking, and blushes when he’s caught.

Just when Seb’s at the point of murdering Sherlock, Watson, or possibly both, a big black car draws up to the curb. It isn’t Seb’s first time being hustled into the back by Mycroft Holmes’ pretty assistant, although it’s the first time he’s had to show the driver how to fold the stroller-- it’s not too different than breaking down a rifle, though he doesn’t say so. Mycroft’s assistant eyes Isobel with something like horror. 

“Want to hold her?”, Seb asks.

The look he gets in return could peel paint. “Thank you, no. I must say, Colonel, you seem substantially less concerned to be seeing Mr. Holmes than in the past.”

Isobel shifts in his lap, reaching for the woman’s dark glasses, and he blows warm air on the back of her neck to distract her. “I haven’t shot anyone in months this time,” he says mildly. “I haven’t got anything to fear, for once.”

Mycroft’s assistant actually laughs at that. “You have no idea, clearly,” she says. She’s very pretty, and very clearly an alpha; her small hands on the Blackberry are capable and quick and her knuckles are as scarred as Seb’s. He wonders if she’s Mycroft’s alpha, and what she’s like in bed, and if she ever puts down the Blackberry.

It’s been eighteen months since his five minutes with John Watson-- before that it was Jim, which, Christ, was four years ago now. Not that Jim was an alpha, even. Seb needs to find himself a fuck, and not this one, who is absolutely trouble and not even close to his type.

Much to Seb’s shock, Mycroft Holmes seems at first to be mostly interested in Isobel. He’d never seemed like the baby-mad sort to Seb, but his face definitely softens, when he looks at her.

Seb’s always rather admired Mycroft, even when Mycroft was having him waterboarded. It’s vanishingly rare for an omega-- and particularly one of their generation-- to manage any sort of proper leadership role. For Mycroft to run the country, even from the shadows-- fifty years ago omegas hadn’t had the vote in Britain. 

“I brought you here to offer you a job, Colonel,” Mycroft says. 

“Christ, yes, please.”

“You haven’t heard what it is,” Mycroft says, but his lip quirks a little, almost in a smile. “Is life with my brother so unbearable as all that?” 

“Worse,” Seb says, and today he actually means it. “He’s been teaching Isobel Mandarin and Farsi, and he’s thinking she’ll be able to start assisting him in the lab in a year or so.”

Mycroft sighs. “He wants to know if genius can be created, I think. You and Dr. Watson are ideal contributors for such an experiment-- both of you are of above average intelligence and well-educated, but not extraordinarily so, and one can certainly hypothesize that your child will be in possession of more or less the same degree of native intelligence.”

“Yeah,” Seb says. “I’m not so thick I don’t get it. I’d just prefer she not be used as a guinea pig. Look, I’ll do almost anything to get out of the house these days, so long as you sort a child-minder for me. I’m fairly sure you’ve already seen my military record and I know you’ve seen my criminal one, so you know I’m not lying when I say I’m the best sniper in England and I can take orders and give them.”

“Believe me, Colonel, I’m well aware of your bona fides. You’re eminently qualified to shoot people. I thought you might be pleased to be on the right side again.”

Seb looks down at Isobel, wiggling in his arms and intent on the laptop on Mycroft’s desk. “I am,” he says softly, thinking of the things he did for Jim, and after Jim. He’d thought there was no coming back from it. And he hadn’t cared, not really. He’d been so angry, for such a long time, and Jim had given him focus, pointed him like a much- loved, much-used weapon-- and Seb had let himself be used.

He isn’t that weapon anymore; he isn’t that person anymore. “Are you looking for an assassin?,” he asks, his chin on Is’s head. She smells like baby shampoo and, more faintly, like she needs her diaper changed, because that’s what Seb’s life has come down to lately.

 

“I am not,” Mycroft says. “Which is not to say that there won’t be occasional wet work. It’s domestic anti-terrorism, if you like.”

“Okay,” Seb says. “Okay.” He takes the folder of paperwork Mycroft hands him. “That sounds pretty great, actually.”

“Anthea will sort the details out,” Mycroft says, and Seb recognizes he’s been dismissed and stands up, juggling the baby and the folder and the rucksack with diapers and baby wipes. Mycroft puts out a hand to steady Isobel and draws it back as if he’s been burned. The look on his face would break Seb’s heart, if he had one.

He doesn’t want to talk about this, not with Mycroft. “I appreciate the opportunity,” he says, and leaves without looking back. Jim always called Mycroft the Iceman; if he isn’t, if he cracks up the same as anyone does, Seb doesn’t want to know.

The job is more or less what he did in Iraq and Afghanistan, with a little of what he’d done for Jim: patrolling, negotiation, intelligence, the occasional spot of torture or execution. Seb likes the work, the benefits are excellent, and after the first couple of times when things get rough they stop treating him like an omega who might fall apart at the first sight of violence and start treating him like a person.

In mid- October Seb’s team spends three days tracking a nineteen year old boy suspected of communicating with ISIL. It’s hot and muggy and Seb has a raging headache by the time they get the go order. “Mr. Holmes wants him alive if possible,” Katie says, and Seb eyes the kid standing on the corner, sets his rifle on the seat, climbs out of the van and sprints across the street and flattens him.

He scrapes the hell out of his elbow, but it’s worth it. When they have the kid cuffed and in the van and started processing and he has time to think again, he can feel a trickle of blood down the back of his thighs. He’s coming into heat. Now that the adrenaline’s worn off, he recognizes the headache for the warning signal it was. He needs to get home. Bad things happen to omegas in full-blown heat and alone on public transportation or the streets. Seb weighs fourteen stone and has a gun and a knife and almost thirty years of hand- to- hand and weapons training, but he’s not really in the mood to explain to Mycroft or the police why he had to cut his way through the alphas of London.

Because omegas don’t go out when they’re in heat, not if they don’t want to be gang-raped. It wasn’t even against the law until the 1940s, which is something Seb tries not to think too hard about. Seb’s mother’s mother had been an omega and she hadn’t even legally been a person. He should have asked Mycroft for a prescription for the Pill. He should be grateful his father gave up his ambassadorship and moved them back from Saudi, where omegas still aren’t people, before Seb hit puberty.

He could tell Katie, of course; she’s a little bit of a bitch but she’d see he got home safely. And of course he’d lose his job, because no one wants to work with an omega who can’t even keep track of his cycle. He didn’t even think about it. Sometimes he thinks Jim was right, and he really is too stupid to be let out without a keeper.

In the end he gets the civilian medic to look at his elbow and while they’re alone he tells her. “It’s not that unusual,” she says. “A year without cycling is the average, but some omegas go six months and some go almost twenty-four.” She gives him a pad and squirts him with something lavendar to cover his scent, and tells Katie he needs to be checked out, just as a precaution.

She drives him home in the ambulance, with the lights off. Seb texts Watson on the way and lets him know he’ll need to pick up Isobel from daycare and bring her home. He’ll be pissed, but Seb doesn’t much care. Sherlock’s in the kitchen; Seb jogs past and up the stairs without saying anything.

In the shower he fucks himself open with his fingers, and then with the big dildo he keeps just for this. Two orgasms is enough to take the edge off and make things-- not comfortable, but bearable. He should ice the elbow, probably, but that would mean going down to the kitchen and facing Sherlock, who almost certainly knows what Seb’s been doing.

Instead he reads for a while, heating pad on his stomach for the cramps, struggling to concentrate. He’s relieved to hear Watson on the stairs, steps heavy and a little irregular. At least Is is always good for a distraction. Watson knocks on the door and opens it without waiting. Well, it’s his bedroom, technically. 

“I left Isobel with Mrs. Hudson,” he says before Seb can ask. “Sherlock said you were hurt--.”

“I scraped my elbow,” Seb says with as much dignity as he can muster. “And I’m in heat.”

Watson stops halfway across the room, eyes enormous, the beginning of an erection tenting his scrubs. 

Seb’s cock twitches in response. “I don’t suppose you fancy a fuck,” he says resignedly. “Just for old times’ sake.”

Watson’s pretty clearly excited about the idea. Seb sits up and digs through the nightstand until he finds an unopened box of condoms. Just to be safe he checks the date, but they’re okay. Watson’s an optimist, because Seb’s fairly confident he doesn’t get much action. Seb strips off his shirt and shorts and rolls onto his stomach and it’s a good thing he did that prep work in the shower because Watson apparently doesn’t believe in foreplay.

If Seb weren’t in heat it would hurt; it probably will hurt tomorrow. But today it feels amazing, and it’s all Seb can do to keep from screaming the walls down with each thrust. Watson feels much bigger than he remembers, much, much bigger than Jim. He isn’t doing anything special, but with the hormones he doesn’t exactly have to. 

Seb comes against the sheets without even touching his dick and his body clenches around Watson like it’s trying to turn inside out. Watson bites him hard just where his neck joins his shoulder and stutters to a climax, breathing hard. Seb lies under him, too fucked out even to mind the mess. He’s half asleep when Watson gets up. 

He listens to Watson going back down the stairs. He’d thought-- he didn’t know what he’d thought. That Watson was going to stay in bed and hold Seb’s hand, maybe. That the world was a different place, suddenly, because they’d fucked. Just because the first time had changed everything. Seb rolls out of the wet spot and and on to his back, and stares up at the ceiling.

He thinks about the awkward, awkward lecture his father had given him and Fleur when he was sixteen, about the responsibilities of an alpha to an omega in heat. August had gone on and on and on about aftercare, while Seb and Fleur had both stared fixedly down at the kitchen table in mutual horror. Seb had lost his virginity at seventeen, to an alpha from the local Pony Club with an enormous pink vibrator, and she’d been a great deal more solicitous than Watson, who appeared to have fucked right off.

Seb pictures Isobel at sixteen, twenty-six, forty-six, and feels a certain amount of pity for August. As little as he wants to have this conversation with his daughter someday, he also doesn’t want an alpha to ever screw her and leave her like this. It’s his own fault, of course; he has no right to expect anything at all from John Watson, and if he wanted more he could have asked for it.

He gets up after a while, sore and stiff and sticky, and pulls off the sheets and rinses off in the shower and makes up the bed. His elbow is a bit swollen and he has scrapes and bruises he didn’t even notice when he got them. He should go and get Is from Mrs. Hudson, but the thought of a twenty minute nap without her is suddenly irresistible. 

It feels as if he’s just gone to sleep when he hears Watson again, heavy on the stairs, and the door opens. Watson’s juggling the baby, the diaper bag, an ice pack, and a couple of bottles of beer. “Hey,” he says, handing Isobel to Seb, giving him a slow, shy smile, “I’m sorry it took me so long. Sherlock-- well, you know what he’s like.”

“Yeah,” Seb says. Isobel bounces on the bed next to him, singing something that might be Elvish or Pashto or the heavily accented French of the West African child minders, but probably is still just the language only babies speak. 

And Watson-- Watson sits on to the bed, too, and carefully cleans Seb’s arm-- which ought to be the cleanest road rash in England by now-- comfortable and domestic in a way that makes Seb think of Jim on his rare, treasured good days.

Seb could blame hormones for making him want to lie down and put his head in Watson’s lap, to lay down his guns and beg to be fucked, made pregnant, kept as a pet.

 

Jim would have laughed at him. Jim would have said, “This is why betas rule the world, tiger, because we’re not sex mad like you lot.”

Seb’s not even sure, these days, whether it’s Jim he misses or just a warm body in his bed, the relief of having someone actually see him. He suddenly wants, desperately, to get out of the flat, to go for a run or on the run, anything that doesn’t involve making dinner and sitting at the table with this man like a good omega with his alpha-- although, of course, a really good omega would eat in the kitchen after he was sure the alpha was satisfied. But he’s in heat and it would be crazy to go out when he doesn’t have to.

Isobel drops Sophie the giraffe off the edge of the bed and says something that sounds almost, but not conclusively, like it might be, “Merde.” Seb knows exactly how she feels.

Watson picks Sophie up and places her carefully against the pillows, smoothing her crumpled ear. “Thanks,” Seb says, but even he doesn’t know if he means for the giraffe or the first aid or the sex.


End file.
